Welcome to Nikola Tesla's Interactive Website

Nikola Tesla, Master of Lightning

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system.

Inventions

Alternating Currents

An electric current that reverses its direction many times a second at regular intervals, typically used in power supplies. It caused a stir at the 1893 World's Expo in Chicago, ignting the war of currents.

Fluorescent Bulbs

Of course he didn't invent light itself, but he did invent how light can be harnessed and distributed. Tesla developed and used fluorescent bulbs in his lab some 40 years before industry "invented" them.

X-Ray

Electromagnetic and ionizing radiation was heavily researched in the late 1800s, but Tesla researched the entire gamut. Everything from a precursor to Kirlian photography, which has the ability to document life force.

Radio

Guglielmo Marconi was initially credited, and most believe him to be the inventor of radio to this day. However, the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943, when it was proven that Tesla invented the radio years previous to Marconi.

Remote Control

This invention was a natural outcropping of radio. Patent No. 613809 was the first remote controlled model boat, demonstrated in 1898. Utilizing several large batteries and radio signals controlled switches.

Electric Motor

Tesla's invention of a motor with rotating magnetic fields could have freed mankind much sooner from the stranglehold of Big Oil. However, his invention in 1930 succumbed to the economic crisis and the world war that followed.

Tesla Coil

The Tesla Coil is certainly something that big industry would have liked to suppress: the concept that the Earth itself is a magnet that can generate electricity (electromagnetism) utilizing frequencies as a transmitter.

Wireless Communication

Tesla built a tower that would use the natural frequencies of our universe to transmit data, including a wide range of information communicated through images, voice messages, and text.

PLACE OF BIRTH

PLACE OF DEATH

Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current electrical system that's widely used today, and discovered the rotating magnetic field - the basis of most AC machinery.

Synopsis

Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla was born in July of 1856, in what is now Croatia. He came to the United States in 1884, and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. He sold several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. His 1891 invention, the "Tesla coil," is still used in radio technology today. Tesla died in New York City on January 7, 1943.

Early Life

Famous Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in what is now Smiljan, Croatia. Tesla's interest in electrical invention was likely spurred by his mother, Djuka Mandic, who invented small household appliances in her spare time while her son was growing up. Tesla's father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest. After studying in the 1870s at the Realschule, Karlstadt (later renamed the Johann-Rudolph-Glauber Realschule Karlstadt); the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria; and the University of Prague, Tesla began preparing for a trip to America.

Famed Inventor

Tesla came to the United States in 1884, and soon began working with famed inventor and business mogul Thomas Edison. The two worked together for a brief period before parting ways due to a conflicting business-scientific relationship, attributed by historians to their incredibly different personalities: While Edison was a power figure who focused on marketing and financial success, Tesla was a commercially out-of-tune and somewhat vulnerable, yet extremely pivotal inventor, who pioneered some of history's most important inventions. His inventions include the "Tesla coil," developed in 1891, and an alternating-current electrical system of generators, motors and transformers—both of which are still used widely today.

Death and Legacy

Poor and reclusive, Nikola Tesla died on January 7, 1943, at the age of 86, in New York City—where he had lived for nearly 60 years. His legacy, however, has been thriving for more than a century, and will undoubtedly live on for decades to come.

Several books and films have highlighted Tesla's life and famous works, including Nikola Tesla, The Genius Who Lit the World, a film created by the Tesla Memorial Society and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia; and The Secret of Nikola Tesla, which stars Orson Welles as John Pierpont Morgan (J.P. Morgan). In recent years, a street sign entitled "Nikola Tesla Corner" was installed in honor of the famous inventor, near the 40th Street-6th Avenue intersection in New York City.

Wardenclyffe Project

Over the past several years, several nonprofit organizations, high-profile individuals, municipalities and Tesla enthusiasts have been involved in a different kind of effort to uphold Tesla's legacy: A project to preserve Tesla's still-standing, still-abandoned New York laboratory, Wardenclyffe, and turn it into a museum of the famous inventor's work. For more than a decade, New York's Nikola Tesla Science Center has been working to gain momentum and, subsequently, funding for preserving Wardenclyffe. Since then, the lab's ownership has been passed through several hands, and public interest for the project has slowly but steadily been growing.

Interest escalated in February 2009, when the Wardenclyffe site was posted for sale, for nearly $1.6 million. For several years, the Tesla Science Center worked diligently to raise funds for the lab's preservation. The TSC was able to purchase the property in 2013 and plans to turn the site into a science museum.

Tesla Museum

Contact Us

The Tesla Foundation

The Tesla Foundation was established in 1992 to research and analyse the works and archives of the great inventor Nikola Tesla. Our main office is located in Krunska 51, 11000 Beograd, Serbia.

Disclaimer: This website is based on the inventor Nikola Tesla, however, it does not belong to any official foundation or recognized organisation. It was originally created as a personal interactive academic / educational project for Tiltan School of Design and Visual Communication.